2003-09-24 - 11:18 p.m.
#125: No Need for The Absolutely Last Entry in Auckland. From My House, Anyway.
Note to self: Two entries in the space of one day. Will wonders never cease? I guess there's something to be said for "last minute inspiration", afterall. I just wish I could and would do this more often WITHOUT the reality of a house moving hovering over my head. Maybe someone needs to have direct access to my brains pain centres and threaten to give me mind searing jolts whenever I fail to update my journal regularly. I seem to respond very quickly to threats to my wellbeing, inner or otherwise.
I'm actually just typing this up just for the heck of it and to muse for a little while. I'm not going to get another chance to mull in front of a computer for a very long while after today: so I might as well make the most of it. And this IS going to be my last night in this two storey display house that I once called home, so that's another reason to type up this entry. And if I wasn't writing this entry, I'd be playing SimGolf right now, so that's yet another reason to be typing up this entry. Only I want to play SimGolf. Dear lord, a game about managing a golf course and keeping its members happy shouldn't be so addictive but it is! It IS! Why did I pick up this horrifically addictive management game? Why didn't I just put it down and have an extra 10 dollars in my pocket?? Why is God so cruel to me so??? And so forth and so forth. So I'm going to sit here mulling over my computer, on the last night living in this house, not playing SimGolf and typing up this entry. Right!
.... Soooo.... What do people what to hear about here?
My parents have gone out to dinner leaving me here alone to pack my remaining belongings (I think they sensed that I needed some time alone. With my room.) which have now been safely (hopefully) stowed away into small cardboard boxes that will later be put into the giant shipping container that's going to be swinging by tomorrow. Originally, this job was going to be left to the packers who'd been here since yesterday, but my mother and I took it upon ourselves to pack the smaller things to help them along. And we needed to get everything out of the house by tomorrow so the new owners could move in by Friday (26th). So what I'd previously left on the shelf for the packers to do their thing on, I decided to put away myself with the boxes they brought (originally, we were handed only a small number of boxes from the shipping company and told to leave the rest for their workers). In hindsight, I probably would have done that anyway. Was I REALLY going to let these brutes touch my extended graphic novel collection, budding artbook collection and library of Terry Pratchett books? I think not! Admittedly however, I'm going to have to trust them with my computer tomorrow, because that's the only thing I can't really pack by myself, what with tossing away the boxes they came in long ago. God, I hope nothing happens to this computer in the move. I mean, I've backed things up and everything and I may (or may not) be getting a new one in Adelaide anyway, but.... Actually that's a pretty compelling argument to not worry about this computer. Sorted.
Anyway, the house now looks very bare. Oh sure, there are piles upon piles of boxes and cardboard wrapped furniture but: Bare. How quickly the houses atmosphere changed over the simple course of 2 days was both amazing and disappointing at the same time. Amazing, because I never thought I'd see so much stuff disappear so quickly into the brown cubes and other assorted shapes depending upon what had been disappeared. And depressing because, as I mentioned before, it's rather sad to see ones entire life be so casually put away and leaving behind no vistages that you were ever there. My room looks like that of a complete strangers: empty bookshelves, gaping wardrobes, unfilled drawers and desks. I had a put a lot of personality into this room (well, a lot of stuff I bought and accumulated over the years, anyway) and now it's a blank slate again: save for the computer and desk that lies in front of me now as I type away at this entry. And then that's going to disappear into brown boxes, along with my desk, bookshelves and bed. And then the room is going to be even more empty than it was before. I feel sad about that. I hope I don't have to move house again, but moving to Adelaide, Australia is more of a deadend than anything else so I will have to move. If I do want to break into the voice over or show biz industry at all, Adelaide is most certainly not the place to do it and I'd have to get out of there. And then I'd have to pack up all my stuff again.... Aiyaiyai.
And I have a lot of stuff. A LOT of stuff. I was carefully numbering my boxes to show what stuff was mine, starting at 5A and going onwards as I packed away more and more boxes of my goodies (including my CDs of anime, DVDs and toy-- action figures). By the end I'd packed my stuff (including my books for today) I'd hit 5Z. 26 boxes filled with nothing but my stuff. And only one of those was for my clothes. And even then I had some trouble filling it up completely. Looking at the little list I'd drawn up, I see that 7 boxes were for my videos, 2 were for my action figures, 5 were for my CDs and DVDs, 2 were for bits and bobs that didn't really go anywhere, and a whopping 9 boxes were used for my books: graphic novels, comics, softcover and hardcover novels and so forth. Overall 26 boxes of stuff. Not good, considering that I don't even know what kind of house we'll be moving into when we reach Adelaide. It'll most likely be a lot smaller than the one we're currently in, in which case I'd most likely have to get rid of some of the excess baggage. I hope I can get rid of some of the excess baggage. I seem to have a lot of things I really don't want to let go of, even though I don't use them that much, if at all, nowadays.
There are things like my Lego collection, my artwork from high school, my hardcopy diaries from the days I didn't have the internet and so forth. Holdovers and mementos of my life that I've stuck into various dark corners of room like so much padding. Far away enough that I don't have to look at them directly, but close enough so that I could pull them out sometime to have a look and remember what I did back in those days and where I came from in order to become who I am today. I guess you could say that I owe my 23 years of life on this green earth thanks to the previous 22 and I have to pay my respects to them. Sounds weird, doesn't it? Well, we Chinese have to respect our ancestors, so.... Maybe I'm practising? eheh. I wonder if that's the reason why I'm so tightly conservative, though. I don't mean in a social manner, I think I've thoroughly proven the point that I am an attention whore, and would do anything to focus the audience that is the world on me; no, I mean conservative more in terms of looking towards the future and my plans for it. Sometimes I feel like I'm so weighed down by my past that I can't move in any direction. I have to live for the ambitions of not only myself as of now, but also for those past selves of the last 22 years. And I can't ruddy well remember them all (except for the one I had in high school: Which was to get extremely rich, real fast. That one kinda stays with you your whole life, though), so I decide the best possible plan of action is absolutely no action whatsoever. Is that it? Is that why I'm so trapped looking at small jobs, leaping from minimum wage to minimum wage, just to avoid actually trying to get some kind of future? Or maybe I'm just lazy. Yeah, it's probably that.
.... No matter how many times I muse, I'm still bad at it. Oy. Well, at least attending the voiceover workshop in the Master Class at Wellingtons Armageddon renewed my resolve to go into the field. I got complimented (sorta) on my voice by Veronica Taylor and Chris Sabat, two heavily involved anime voice actors (and one ADR director) and that definitely gave me the (sorta) ego boost I needed to dive head first (sorta) into searching for the appropriate people to give me a job based on my voice when I arrive in Adelaide! Sorta. I guess I must be doing SOMETHING right, embarassment and false modesty notwithstanding. I just hope, hope, hope, hope, HOPE this sense of rightness keeps me going until I get what I want. I hope I'm doing the right thing. I hope I don't regret doing this. I hope I don't screw up.
Well. I guess this is it for this entry. I'd like to add some more about how this is the last entry etc. But on the offchance that it isn't: See you later.
.... But on the off-offchance that it is: See you MUCH later.
And now, unto planning the Otaking competition for Auckland Armageddon 2004.
